The IT sector has been progressively more and more under pressure to ‘green’ its act; and rightly so. This is a sector that burns natural resources like it’s going out of fashion (which it rapidly is!).

So, lots of worthy groups and logos have sprung up to take away the customer fear of being ‘brown’ and take the pressure off the IT companies to actually do anything that makes a difference.

And if you think that sounds harsh, it’s not and if you want to ensure that you have the juice to power your business in the decades to come, you’d better get involved in taking your suppliers to task and enquiring what actually sits behind those pretty green logos.

An assessment conducted by Gartner at the tail end of last year perfectly illustrates the point. It’s a given that in an industry with such a complex supply chain, measuring progress is not the easiest of tasks, so Gartner made it simple by breaking the measurement process into 5 segments (to see what they were just Google them, it’s all out there).

The results were interesting, with companies like Hewlett Packard coming in within the top 5 (so bad publicity in previous years has actually created some measurable action) but what was most telling was the identity of some of the companies that refused to take part in the assessment; Microsoft, EDS, Accenture, and Oracle, among others…

Basically, it’s all those companies that sing green and continue to woo the big corporates into spending with them but are actually doing next to nothing (I’m being kind) about putting their own environmental house in order, whilst preaching to the rest of us how environmentally irresponsible we must be for not considering adding to their, frankly distasteful, profiteering.

Now I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but since their profligacy is ultimately, and in the not-too-distant future, going to impact on your ability to do business as usual, should you not be a little more diligent in checking out (or having those within your organisation who are tasked to do this, check out) exactly what sits behind their ‘spiel’ and all those fancy green badges?

It strikes me that whilst the IT giants go hurtling towards an energy oblivion in some sort of Thelma and Louise final dash, scooping up as much money as is still (a) left in circulation and (b) worth something, we are all saying nothing, quietly satisfied that we admired all the green logos and have done our due diligence.

This is the type of activity that got us to where we are today but will not get us to where we need to be tomorrow.

Whether we like it or not, we need to be more discerning about our actions and their impact on the energy store that we still command; we need to be just as diligent about verifying the statements of those organisations we choose to allow to supply us and if ever there was a time to pick up the challenge, I would have thought that, stood at the edge of commercial entropy, now is a good time.

Of course, you can choose to do nothing. That’s what we in the business sector have been doing for the last 20 years… but look where that’s got us.

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